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Monday, 9 June 2014

Spider Bones by Kathy Reichs

This is the first Kathy Reichs I've read, and, well, I didn't hate it.
(Unlike the Patricia Cornwell I read last year.) But neither am I really
grabbed by it. Will I read more? Only time will tell, and whether or
not one of my lists coughs up one for me to read. I certainly won't
avoid it, but I know there's at least one mystery writer writing
forensic anthropology mysteries that my mother likes more. Maybe I'll
search him out.

Also, I watched the first two episodes of Bones
and hated, hated, hated them, so that might explain why I avoided these
for so long. I knew the books were probably better than the show, but
the association lingered. I've also been told the show got better, but
I've never gotten back to it.

Temperance Brennan is doing her
thing with a drowned body in Quebec when the fingerprints throw up an
American, long dead in Vietnam. So she is requested to go and disinter
the recovered remains of that vet from his family cemetery. And then she
is requested to go to Hawaii. This requesting go on a lot? While
interesting, it did leave the story feeling a little fractured - oh
yeah, there was this story back HERE we haven't talked about in a while.

So she goes to Hawaii where the task force for finding American
military remains and repatriating them resides. And where she used to
work. And there, she finds more relevant bodies than you can shake a
stick at, and some surprising DNA matches and lack of matches.

I'm
all for unlikely medical twists, but there were two in this book, which
feels like one too many. When you have two conditions or events, for
each of which there are only one or two recorded precedents, including
both does strain credulity.

It also puts this book into the
category of pulling out left-field information to solve the murder,
something the reader could not possibly have guessed. I don't have a
huge problem with that, but I do tend to classify such books mentally as
thrillers, rather than mysteries. (I'm looking at you, James
Patterson!) But this book has enough actual mystery, and a few bits
where I could speculate on what had happened, to keep it in the mystery
camp.

The family drama was fine, but didn't add a ton to the
story - it felt like it would be largely the same story without it as
with it. But as a mystery, this was fine, if not great. I doubt it will
linger in my memory for long, but I never got angry with it.